


pouring from the rocks

by pigeonchest



Series: not supposed to come home [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:55:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24294691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeonchest/pseuds/pigeonchest
Summary: The southern seas are very, very cold. Toph kind of forgot about that, in the year or so since the Wani last sailed this close to the South Pole.(or; the last ordinary day in the life of toph beifong, ward of the dragon of the west, former fiancee of the crown prince.)
Relationships: Toph Beifong & Zuko
Series: not supposed to come home [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1753861
Comments: 42
Kudos: 335





	pouring from the rocks

**Author's Note:**

> i came up with this au a hundred thousand years ago and, thanks to quar, recently rediscovered an old outline in my childhood bedroom. this is the first atla fic ive written in 8 years! goin back to my roots! glad 2 b back!
> 
> title from 'tim riggins looks at waterfalls' by nico alvarado.

The southern seas are very, very cold. Toph kind of forgot about that, in the year or so since the Wani last sailed this close to the South Pole. Uncle insisted she start wearing shoes the second they put their last Earth Kingdom port behind them, and she would have fought it more if she couldn’t tell, even through the soft soles of her boots, how cold and slippery the decks have become. She asked Uncle for the kind of pointy-toed armored boots the crew sometimes wear, but they couldn’t be requisitioned in her size on such short notice. If she had those she’d be able to see better, but she almost, almost doesn’t mind the way the leather boots muffle her steps, because it means she can sneak up on people. Toph isn’t going to give up an opportunity like that.

Someone’s standing still as a stone right at the bow of the ship. Toph can’t tell who it is with her feet all wrapped up in leather—even she isn’t that good—but she’s mostly sure it’s Zuko. Partly from the size, partly from the controlled firebender breath, and partly from the fact that whoever it is is standing frozen, staring out the water like it’s a puzzle. None of the rest of the crew ever stays stationary for that long. They’re all much busier and much less dramatic.

Toph slides as quietly as she can across the deck. Someone to her right, Jiro maybe, snickers quietly. She grins in their direction. The closer she gets, the more certain she is that it’s Zuko at the bow. When she’s close enough to taste salt spray, she holds her breath. Nobody ever expects Toph to be quiet, and that’s her secret weapon.

“Hey Prince Zuko,” she says, from right at his shoulder.

He jumps a mile. From this close, Toph can tell that his feet actually leave the deck for a second.

“Shit,” he says, “don’t _do_ that. And don’t tell Uncle I said shit in front of you.” Toph doesn’t know why every person on the ship is so convinced that she’s never heard anyone curse before. She’s only been sailing with the Fire Navy since she was nine, for Agni’s sake.

“What’s out there today?” she asks. She wraps her hands around the icy metal of the railing.

Zuko huffs. “Water. Ice.”

“Huh. Ice is new.” The air freezes in Toph’s nose now when she breathes, and the sea spray is burning cold on her exposed knuckles. Ice makes sense.

“We’re far enough south now. Finally.” 

Someone pipes up from behind them. “We saw a pod of manta-whales earlier, Lady Toph.” So it was Jiro after all. Toph likes him. “Not too far off starboard.” Maybe Zuko would have told her that eventually, or more likely he’s in a mood today. Uncle will definitely bring it up when she asks him later. But he’ll probably say that the whales appeared from the west like the rising moon. Or something. Toph doesn’t have a way with words, and neither does Zuko.

“What are manta-whales like?” Toph asks, to whoever cares to answer. “I’ve never seen one.” Zuko shifts his weight beside her.

“They have wings, my lady,” Jiro calls. “And they’re enormous.” At this distance, with her boots on, she can’t tell if he sidestepped the joke on purpose or not. Maybe she doesn’t like Jiro, actually.

“You’ve never seen anything,” Zuko mumbles under his breath. He likes for her and Uncle to be formal with him in front of the crew, but Toph jabs his side anyway, right in the weak spot where the chest plate connects.

He wheels around to face her, huffing so strongly that his breath ruffles her bangs, hot on her forehead in the cold air. She grins up in his direction. “Take me to the galley, Prince Zuko. I want breakfast.”

“I’m busy.”

“When I slip and fall overboard and hit my head on an iceberg and die, you’ll wish you weren’t so busy all the time,” she says sweetly. Toph wants company, and also somebody with a long reach to get the sweet buns off the high shelf where Uncle makes the cook keep them.

“I don’t have time for this,” Zuko growls, but he lets her grab his arm in a death grip and drag him below.

+

Furnished with a slightly stale pineapple bun, Toph wanders up to Uncle’s quarters. Thanks to her lessons with Uncle, Toph can perform a tea ceremony in both the traditional Earth style and the Fire High Court style. She can sign her own name, do sums, and recite proverbs and philosophical principles by a whole bunch of venerable scholars, including some Air monks that Toph is pretty sure Uncle wasn’t supposed to tell her about. She’s also learned how to tie a variety of useful knots and how to hustle grown men at pai sho. Her education with Uncle has been scattered at best. The man is a general, not a tutor, and he has no idea what a highly born young lady is supposed to be learning. Toph is fine with that. She wishes, however, that he would give up on trying to teach her how to read. 

“Good afternoon,” Uncle says when Toph gets up to his quarters, and he sounds shifty enough that she knows he’s got the sand tray out. When he first told her what he wanted to teach her, she’d just laughed. Uncle’s jokes weren’t usually good; she wanted to encourage him. But then he told her his grand plan and spilled a bunch of tired proverbs about literacy and knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and Toph realized he was dead serious.

The sand tray, Toph’s greatest enemy, is small and lacquered with what she thinks is probably a gold inlay, filled with a shallow layer of fine-grained sand. It’s probably elaborate and beautiful, because Uncle likes that kind of stuff, but it’s wasted on Toph on every possible level. She hates that spirits-damned tray _so_ much.

Uncle waits for Toph to stop groaning and settle at the little table they use for lessons, then slowly traces a character in the sand with the back end of a calligraphy brush.

“Eggplant,” says Toph.

“Try again,” Uncle says.

“Tranquility. No, wait, pickle.”

“ _Ocean_. But your youthful creativity is thought-provoking as always,” Uncle says, cheerful. He taps the tray on the table to wipe the sand clean. “Let’s try again.”

“I think this is definitely hurting my spiritual development.” Toph crosses her arms and looks away from the tray. Looking away doesn’t mean she can’t still _see_ it, that’s the whole point of the sand. But it’s the thought that counts. 

“Out of adversity, strength blossoms,” Uncle says. Toph collapses, face against the table. They’ll be at this for hours. 

“What if we did court manners instead,” Toph says into the tabletop. Anything is better than reading. At least Toph knows court manners backwards and forwards, and it’s not like they’re any use on the ship. It’s occasionally mildly fun to bicker with Uncle about what Toph’s precise title is. She’s not Earth nobility anymore; her parents renounced all her claims to the Beifong name when they made the deal that got her betrothed to Zuko. The betrothal doesn’t give Toph any status in the Fire court, though, because Zuko got himself banished. Uncle’s a prince and a general and also responsible for her, but short of adoption or enlistment that offers Toph nothing official—and she knows better than to want to be officially attached to the Fire Nation’s line of succession. Sometimes, in ports, Uncle introduces her as his assistant. 

Uncle writes another character in the sand. She’s mostly sure it’s ‘prince.’

“Mangosteen,” says Toph.

“Again,” says Uncle.

+

Toph’s favorite places on the ship are all down low, under the waterline where everything is warm and noisy and completely cooped up in metal. In particular, she likes the engine room and the komodo-rhino hold. None of the nonbender crew are allowed in with the engines. Toph is especially not allowed in with the engines, but she can feel the coal through the wall. It’s grounding. Literally. Uncle would like that pun if she said it to him, which she won’t. The komodo-rhino hold is as alive as the engine room in a different way, full of big sweet animals that remind Toph of the badgermoles she left behind in Gaoling. She’s been told that the komodo-rhinos don’t _look_ sweet. She has a feeling that some people would say the same thing about badgermoles. Looks don’t matter to Toph, for obvious reasons.

Her brain wrung out from too much stupid reading, Toph makes her way down towards the hold. Even this close to the boiler, it’s colder than usual in the hallways. She idly taps a hand along the wall as she walks, half out habit and half so they can tell she’s coming in the engine room. It’s been a long time since she actually needed the help navigating. 

Sure enough, Toph is still six or so steps from the engine room when An Chen leans out and says, “Afternoon, kid. Got a project in mind?” A burst of dry heat comes with him.

“You know it,” Toph says. 

“Have fun, then,” he says. He drops a piece of coal into her hands and ducks back into the engine room. It’s a decent sized piece, pretty uniformly shaped. An Chen knows what she prefers.

She and her coal stomp further down the hallway towards the komodo-rhino hold, not because she needs to see but because she enjoys stomping. It’s loud down here, between the hallways echoing and the engine clanging and the general ship noise. Toph likes to add a little to the cacophony.

The animal hold smells like dung and straw, and one of the rhinos—probably Typhoon, she’s always the noisiest—grunts when Toph walks in.

“Hey,” says Toph. “How are you guys today?”

She settles down in front of Petal’s stall right in the middle of the hold and kicks her boots off, wiggling her toes. She won’t be expected for dinner until the watch changes. There’s still plenty of time. She cups her lump of coal in both hands, getting a feel for the shape and shear of it and letting it coat her fingertips in a smear of coal dust. It’s easier once her hands are dirty. She’ll make a manta-whale, she decides. Jiro only set her up with a vague idea of what they look like, but Toph doesn’t care. She’s running out of ways to challenge herself.

The crew know that she’s an earthbender. But they don’t know that she’s an _earthbender_. They don’t know what she can really do. She’s pretty sure that Uncle, with his collector’s eye for art, is totally aware of exactly what her talent with a piece of coal means, but mostly her work goes pretty much unnoticed.

In her parents’ house, before, they had all kinds of fussy artwork. Sometimes they let Toph touch it, but a painting is the same as a calligraphy scroll is the same as a blank piece of paper to her. The piece she really liked, the best one, was also the most expensive, the one that had pride of place in her father’s study. It was a pipa player, sculpted out of stone with the kind of precision and grace that only an earthbending artisan with true talent could achieve. Or so her father said when he let her touch it. The contours of the rock were smooth as water under her fingertips. What Toph can do is much better than that. 

Any hack can carve chunks off of a rock and smooth over the rough edges, but not just anyone can reshape the rock itself, tear it apart along its invisible seams and put it back together so neatly it looks like it was dug out of the earth in whatever shape Toph put it in. It’s easy enough to make the rock do what you want, but Toph makes the rock want it too. And forget working with coal. None of the tutors or art dealers or master artisans that ever came to dinner at the house in Gaoling even thought of using coal. Sometimes Toph wonders what she could do if she had the actual earth at her disposal, if wasn’t perpetually in the middle of the ocean so she could work with more than coal scraps and the little impurities the Fire Nation thinks they can refine out of their steel.

Toph curls her feet under her and gives the manta-whale wings. 

+

“We’re making terrible time,” Zuko says at dinner, rattling his chopsticks against his bowl irritably. 

“Time to _where_?” Toph asks. Toph’s grasp on geography is shaky at best, despite Uncle’s best efforts, but she’s pretty sure that everything in the world is to the north of them by now.

“It is important not to waste fuel when we are so far from friendly ports, Prince Zuko. A good commander stewards resources carefully and judiciously,” says Uncle. Zuko ignores them both in favor of angrily eating a bite of noodles with so much chili that Toph can taste it from across the table. 

“Okay then,” Toph says. “Look what I made.” She pulls the manta-whale out of her pocket and plunks it on the table.

Zuko shifts in his seat and stops eating. “They don’t have feathers,” he says. “The wings are smoother. And you have the tail sideways, it’s more like a paddle.”

“You could have told me that when I asked what they looked like earlier,” Toph says. 

“Well I didn’t know you’d get it so wrong,” Zuko says. “And it’s not like it’ll take you long to fix, anyway.” Of course it won’t. 

In Gaoling, earth sculpting was a ladylike performance, just as much about the look of the artist as the art itself. Toph once had a tutor who set an uninteresting lump of rock in front of her and wouldn’t let her touch it until her back was straight enough and her smile was sweet enough and her skirt flowed just the right way. Here, at the captain’s dinner table on a Fire Navy ship, Toph wipes her mouth with her hand and hunches over her bowl, cradling her sculpture close to her chest. She isn’t wearing a skirt at all, just a pair of Navy uniform pants tailored down to her size. 

She smooths the texture off the manta-whale’s wings, careful not to let a single mote of coal dust drop into her noodles. “This better?”

“The wings should be pointier,” Zuko says. “More triangular, not so much like a bird.” He traces the shape with a finger on the table in front of her, and Toph copies it in coal. Zuko is good with detail when he wants to be. He’d never admit it, but she’s pretty sure he likes her art. A while ago, she gave him a tiny coal replica of Petal, and he never said thank you but he does keep it in plain view on the shelf underneath his swords. And that was before she was even very good.

“It is fine work as always, my dear. You certainly have an eye for form,” Uncle says, chuckling at his own joke.

Toph snorts. “You can have first dibs on this one, Uncle,” she says. “Otherwise I think I’ll give it to Jiro.”

“Ensign Jiro is an idiot,” Zuko says darkly.

“Ensign Jiro is a fine sailor, and would be pleased by such a lovely and thoughtful gift.” Uncle’s got a tone to his voice, probably accompanied by a _look_ in Zuko’s direction. He hates when Zuko badmouths his own crew, and Zuko hates when Uncle _looks_ at him.

“What’d Jiro do?” asks Toph, who likes the crew well enough but likes Zuko’s complaining better.

Zuko just mutters something about barnacle scraping duty and shuts himself up with another mouthful of noodles.

“I’m definitely giving this to him, then,” Toph says, placing her completed manta-whale in the center of the table.

+

In her quarters that night, like every night, Toph kicks aside the woven rug that Uncle bought her to make the cramped metal room more homey. Her quarters are windowless—like she cares—and used to be a storage space before the Wani was commissioned for its current voyage, and Uncle is always very worried about giving Toph a wholesome environment. She’d probably be happier if Uncle let her sleep in the rhino hold, but she has to let him win sometimes.

Toph presses her bare feet hard to the floor and _listens_. She started doing check-ins like this early on in her time on the ship. At first, it was because she was confused and seasick and focusing on the metal made her feel better. By now, she’s aware of the whole ship: Zuko sitting in front of the altar in his quarters, the marines on watch stamping their feet to keep warm, the cook making the next day’s congee. There are no secrets on the Wani, especially not from Toph.

Ensign Ko’s cousin’s friend knew a guy back in Naga who was blind from birth and got around by yelling at walls and listening to footsteps or something like that, and as far as the crew is concerned, that’s what Toph does too. They aren’t quite wrong, probably. Toph does have good hearing and a good sense of space, but that isn’t all. Even she doesn’t quite have words for what, exactly, she does. And she knows better than to say it out loud anyway.

There are a lot of things like that, things Toph keeps to herself. She wouldn’t call them secrets necessarily, just certain things that don’t need to be said. One of those is that Toph doesn’t believe in the Avatar. She doesn’t think he’s alive, or out there somewhere, or maybe even real. She doesn’t know what Zuko would do if she said that to him.

That night Toph dreams that she’s riding in a palanquin. Toph has only ridden in a palanquin twice, both times when she was younger, during the short time she spent in the Fire Nation before Zuko was banished. Once from the harbor to the palace at the top of the Caldera, and the second time back the other way. But in her dream she’s riding in one, and Uncle and Zuko are both there, even though they weren’t in real life. Uncle says _my dear child, i must ask you to be very, very quiet now_ and so Toph puts her hands over her mouth, but someone is singing, words she can’t make out in time with the steady rocking of the palanquin and it’s too loud, someone will find her and burn her, and Uncle promised she would be safe on the ship if she could only get to the harbor without anyone noticing her, but the singing—and she wakes up with her mouth dry and one cold foot pressed to the floor, to find the ship steaming ahead at full speed.

+

It’s colder in the morning than it was the night before, and it takes far too long to wrestle on her stupid boots and enough tunics that she stops shivering. There’s more shipwide movement than usual for the hour, and Toph is curious.

Toph steps out of her room and flags down the first crewman who walks by. “What’s happening?” Toph asks. “Why are we changing course?”

“We’re on the hunt, miss. The prince spotted something due south.” Lieutenant Jee, probably on his way up to the bridge.

“Shit,” Toph mutters. “Again?” Sometimes it seems like Zuko jumps at shadows, following dockside rumors and strange clouds across the world. Maybe this time it was a two headed seal, or a sunbeam off an iceberg, or a whisper in his bad ear.

“Again. Something strange happening at the pole. I guess we’ll see, won’t we.” With that, he tips into a rough bow and goes on his way.

A promising lead is worse than no lead at all. Zuko’s awful when he gets his hopes up. His shouting is already audible from the second level of the command tower. They can probably hear him in Kyoshi. Toph takes a deep breath, shakes out her arms, cracks her neck, and climbs down to the deck.

“Stop wasting time,” Zuko shouts. Toph takes her place next to Uncle, overseeing the chaos and taking the arm he offers. 

“What happened?” Toph asks, under her breath. 

Uncle pats her hand. “He saw a light.”

**Author's Note:**

> for every hour i spent writing this, three more hours went into googling ‘what is a kitchen/bed/floor called on a ship??’
> 
> im pigeonchest on tumblr as well if the spirit moves u to come say hi.


End file.
